Any guesses what the following companies have in common: Dell Computers, NTT Cellular, Consumer Reports, EasyJet, Enron, Intuit, Harry & David, Intel... and Danni's Hard Drive?
They're the better-known members of that august coterie that made eCompany Now magazine's August 2000 list of the "Top 11 Companies That ?Get' The Web."
Danni's Hard Drive? Who'd'a thunk?
"What that means is, we've created a business model that works, we're solid and we're profitable," analyzes Danni Ashe, the moving force behind DHD, "when so many businesses are folding, when all the dot-com bombs are blowing up right now."
It's true. While the stocks of so many online start-ups have lost up to two-thirds of their peak values, Danni's Hard Drive (www.danni.com; www.dannisharddrive.com) is setting records in a number of areas, not the least of which is income of over $5.2 million last year, with an expected revenue of between $6 and $7 million this year - about a 20 percent increase. (Maybe that was the inspiration for DHD's banner cash program, called DanniCash, which debuted at the September ia2000 in New Orleans.)
There have been plenty of changes at Danni's Hard Drive since we profiled the company almost a year ago. They've just about finished remodeling the 16,500 square feet of space they occupy in their main headquarters - five photography and/or video studios which take up the whole second floor of their two-story structure, plus 2500 square feet on the first floor - and they've been forced to rent another 1200 in the building next door for the office workers that were tucked away next to the video feed control room.
And let's not forget those dedicated spaces in the building's parking structure that say "DHD Visitors Only." After all, that's the sort of thing that says you've really made it. (Well, that, and through-the-ceiling demographics.)
But it's been a long haul for the perky blonde, who started out trading magazine layouts for ad space to tout her striptease, masturbation and girl/girl videos. After an inauspicious experience feature-dancing at a club in Florida, where she got busted for going topless, and neither the club owner nor her own agent would help her out of the mess, Ashe returned to L.A. to concentrate on her burgeoning fan club.
"That was when I got on the Internet," she recalls. "I actually made the decision to go to computer programming school because in running my fan club, I used my PC. I had a database program; I had an accounting program, and I just loved fussing with it. This was before I even had e-mail. I didn't really grasp the whole Internet concept at that time. I'd had Prodigy and CompuServe accounts; didn't know what AOL was. So I signed up for a computer programming class, but in the interim, I figured, I keep hearing about this Internet, so I'm going to buy some books, buy some software and do some preliminary homework before I go to school, and I just got sucked in immediately."
But that was back about 1992, long before even the politicians were calling for universal Net access - and the fact that Danni had only a 2400-baud modem didn't help matters.
"I ended up on the Usenet groups, and I got literally addicted; I became a Usenet junkie," she admits. "I was in there all the time, posting photos of myself and chatting, but it literally took me three weeks of answering all this obscure Danni Ashe trivia to prove to everyone that I was who I said I was. There were things that they knew about me that I didn't even know!"
Fortunately, an equipment upgrade was just around the corner, and when Danni finally got a decent baud rate, she knew the Net was where she wanted to be. "All of a sudden, it was like the proverbial lightbulb goes off, and I went, ?That's it! I've gotta have one of these [websites].' It's bizarre. I saw the file structure in my head at that moment."
Getting her dream out on the Net, however, proved more difficult. After trying to explain her concepts of integrated hypertext and non-linear follow-through to a couple of programmers, she gave up, bought the HTML Manual of Style and Negroponte's Being Digital, and built her own site pretty much singlehandedly.
So much for history. At present, Danni's Hard Drive presents two live weekly shows, In Bed With Danni, an interview program where the busty blonde gets the lowdown from celebs and anyone else that catches her fancy, and a two-hour striptease segment featuring some of the country's top female ecdysiasts. And reruns are available at will.
The latter show is shot in a totally green-screened studio with just a small real-life set and laid-in backgrounds, all in "pure digital," Ashe advises. "It goes straight from the Panasonic DV cams, broadcast quality three-chip digital cameras, out onto the Internet through this Trinity system."
The Trinity is a piece of hardware that DHD has been beta testing for the past year for manufacturer Play, Incorporated. "That's what we're using to do our digital video switching," explains Emily Warren, DHD's Director of Technical Operations. "It also has a number of other features built in, special effects/green screen type stuff, so it's a pretty neat piece of hardware. If we wanted to have a performer and we wanted to have flames coming up from the bottom of the screen, that's one of the effects. And you can throw all that in real-time, so you can have the person performing, have it streaming live, and throw in the effect. There's a lot of stuff preprogrammed into it, and you can add your own things to it as well, but there's a whole suite of images and different effects that you can put in there."
But the Trinity, which can easily handle the three cameras DHD uses for its more elaborate shoots, is just the beginning. "Then we have a Silicon Graphics 02 server, which we're using a lot of the image libraries that are only on Silicon Graphics machines, to do the encoding for our proprietary software called Dannivision," Warren continues. "From there, it's encoded and sent to another Silicon Graphics server, which is actually co-located at Abovenet, a huge hosting facility in San Jose. We have a huge four-rack cage of servers. The machine that does the serving of the video is a Silicon Graphics Origen 2000. It looks like a little blue refrigerator. That box is really, really, really beefy. There's a gig of memory in it, and it just churns and churns and churns. We've seen it do 55 megabits per second on one box, which is pretty amazing. You can't get a PC to do that."
Nearly as remarkable as DHD's hardware set-up is the company's proprietary viewing software, Dannivision. "I think it's some of the clearest, the best Internet video there is," notes Ashe.
"Take RealVideo, for example," Warren adds. "They started out as RealAudio, so their main focus [was] to make their streaming audio as great as possible. We came into it from a different perspective. We wanted to make the image look as good as possible; we wanted you to really be able to see the performers and see skin tone and not have it be really washed out like a lot of the other video companies we looked at; their streaming was just blah. So coming at it from that perspective, I think we've had great luck and we've been lucky enough to work with really fabulous people on staff who've gone over this line by line to make it the best software they can make it. It's really amazing."
More recently, Ashe has scored a deal with the Ecast Entertainment Network to put her content on public-venue, non-PC environment on a pay-per-view basis. "I chose to put my site on [Ecast] so my loyal fans can visit it when they're away from their PCs," Ashe says. "Plus by letting people try Danni.com without committing to a subscription fee, I will be reaching a new audience that might not have otherwise found the site at all."
Of course, the bugaboo of any content-based site is piracy, and Ashe has several staffers who devote full-time to the problem. "The thing that's probably been the most beneficial to our business in the last year is the credit card processing technology that we've developed," Ashe recounts. "Fortuitously, mid-year last year, we decided that we were really incensed over the fact that people were stealing from us. It's essentially electronic shoplifting; someone steals a credit card number and manages to buy a subscription, and the next thing you know, you're getting a chargeback because it's an invalid number, or they'll use their number and then swear they never charged it.
"We have developed a really excellent balance between building systems that will scan for things and scrub for fraud, and having a 24-hour staff that looks at every line of data and looks for things that just aren't right. And when they start to catch patterns and other indicators of fraud, they can then start adding those things to our database. So it's a really good blend of technology and just plain old human eyeballs sorting out what looks right and what doesn't look right, and figuring out the patterns. There was a time when there'd be hundreds of fraudulent attempts in a day, but people are learning now that they can't hit us like that anymore. The system can boot anywhere from 20 to 100 people in a day, and manually, we boot anywhere from five to 10 additional accounts a day."
What's been occupying Danni and her staff's time since August, however, is the ongoing dispute over who's the Most Downloaded Woman on the Web. "When we first presented our numbers and got the Guinness record, and Danni was pronounced the Most Downloaded Woman, Cindy Margolis' camp protested," notes Janis Miller, Ashe's assistant. "And somehow Cindy got Guinness to split the record into pay sites and free sites, so Danni and Cindy currently both hold the Guinness record for Most Downloaded Woman, Pay Site for Danni and Free Site for Cindy. I know we resubmitted numbers to also get Danni the record for Most Downloaded Woman on a Free Site because she still has more downloads than Cindy, but Guinness put a hold on the record because they wanted to bring in a third party to review the numbers. I don't know if Cindy has submitted anything as far as numbers go, but it's on hold right now."
DHD currently hosts over 300 model pages, from B-movie actresses who only pose topless, to hardcore porn actresses, plus amateurs, Playmates, Pets and feature strippers. Is it all manageable?
"Depends which day you ask me," Danni replies, recalling the time in 1996 that her server was going down nightly after she'd appeared in a Playboy pictorial. "There are days when I wake up and I go, ?Oh, I can't do it anymore,' and there are other days where it all seems quite easy to handle."
